


La philosophie dans l’obscurité

by Daftinthehead (intravenusann)



Series: Apocaverse [2]
Category: Electronic Dance Music RPF
Genre: M/M, apocaverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-09
Updated: 2015-02-09
Packaged: 2018-03-09 08:35:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3243200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intravenusann/pseuds/Daftinthehead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who he was sees who he will be in the cloudy mirror of who he is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	La philosophie dans l’obscurité

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written April 2011

Ferraris have a way of standing out. For the Testarossa, with its aggressive lines and headlights like open eyes, this rang particularly true. Like its namesake, the car stood out in the misty night like a redheaded woman in a tight-fitting trenchcoat.

He felt a little sick, seeing it like this. The last time he’d seen it was on the television — a tiny, shaking image of its crumpled body. Like a crushed insect, he remembered thinking. No one could survive that.

But here she is — he’s given into that fancy of thinking about the car like a woman — standing on the street corner looking lonely. It’s really quite romantic, walking up to a beautiful woman on the street when her man has left her alone. It’s a shame that he was more interested in her man. And just to piss him off, he sits on the hood, right between her closed eyes.

“Who the fuck—”

“You’re late,” he says, taking a casual drag from his cigarette and pretending that the silhouette cast by a streetlamp is not making his heart stop.

“Do I know you?” Kavinsky asks and it sort of stings, even if he understands.

He looks at the man and realizes that he no longer wants to tell the truth, so he says, “No.” Followed with, “I’m Sebastian.”

Kavinsky’s hand is cold in his, but he expects that and doesn’t flinch.

When they ride together again it will be just like it always was. Just like high school or college or any other time. They are quiet; they listen to music. Kavinsky will drive too fucking fast and won’t let him smoke in the car. He will try, at first, just to see if he’s changed. It’s a test.

And it will be frightening how little death has changed him, the stuff of nightmares. Even physically. His skin is a bit grey and cold and his eyes have that reddish glow in the pupils where one would expect empty darkness, but it’s not as though he’s been left hideously scarred or with his body mangled.

He will look, the first chance that he gets, and Kavinsky will jokingly ask, “Are you checking me out?”

Sebastian’s lips will quirk up at one corner as he turns away, but he never really answers that. He really isn’t sure.

There had been a funeral, even without the body, and he had meant to go. He’d dressed nicely, with a tie, but he was at the front door when his mother touched his shoulder and said, “Give my regards to his family.”

That was all it took; he buckled under the weight of a handful of words.

In the space where they kept all their shoes, he ended up dirtying the knees of his best black slacks clutching his mother’s skirt like a child. She cried too. He never asked, but he imagines that she was afraid of losing him in such a careless, unexpected way. Picking him up off the ground, they cried together. She brushed the hair off his forehead and pressed a kiss there, like she had not in years. 

“You really love him, don’t you?”

And somewhere in the space between past and present tenses, he could no longer bring himself to go to the funeral. It was a sham anyway.

He was manning the phones when someone called in a red Ferrari with plates that came up for the car missing from impound. Emotions washed over him at that, anger first: How dare those fuckers? He’d fucking blow their heads off for touching that car. Not for stealing it, but for sullying it. It was Kavinsky’s car. Then there was shock, followed on creeping footsteps by sorrow.

When the car outraced the squad chasing it — “It’s disappeared, just vanished into thin air!” — he felt something sick and sticky, like hope passed through a meat grinder.

Picking up a habit to match his smoking, Sebastian started walking at night after work. Imagining flashes of a red letter-jacket under every streetlamp, he wondered if grief had driven him insane.

“I think something is following me,” the kid said, holding his elbows so that he was curled up around himself. He was young, still a student, when Sebastian was young too.

He didn’t ask a lot of questions about it. Working the desk made him question his entire career choice, he hated it that much. But the kid wasn’t exactly forthcoming with information either. Sebastian went over the tight, neat handwriting and smoked as he input the information into the bloated database of open cases.

“He’s probably pissed off some girl,” Kavinsky had said at the bar later, when Sebastian told him about work.

Sebastian disagreed, but before he’d picked the right words in his head Pedro had started a joke about some crazy girl who’d stalked him once. Kavinsky laughed it off, so Sebastian did too. His laughter was more infectious than a plague.

The week after that, or close to it, there was a new missing person’s poster. There were always a lot of those — new ones every day — but this one actually caught his attention. He recognized the face staring out at him from the corkboard blanketed in similarly framed faces. He never told Kavinsky about it, because it seemed too serious a thing to mention. Did they have that kind of relationship? Sebastian hadn’t wanted to question it.

And he will never find himself wishing he had, either. It would have blurred the lines between this time and the past

Sometimes the face seemed angry with him, judgmental even. “Why didn’t you do more?” it seemed to ask with its hard, dark-eyed glare. Other times it looked a bit haunted, in a tight, constricted way. It wasn’t that there weren’t a horde of other faces up on the wall, but this one was significant. He’d met this man and heard the tension in his voice when he said, “I think something is following me. Someone, uh, I meant someone.” His eyes shifted from side to side, shadow to shadow — he was terrorized.

There was something out there to be afraid of, he realized then, and whatever it was had caught this kid.

He never tells Kavinsky that yes, he knew him and they were friends and that meant something. In the coming month, he won’t tell the kid that he knows who he is, either, even when he’s curled up in a ditch mumbling, “Who am I? Where am I? Who am I?” with that same look — half judgment, half horror.

There’s blood and dirt matted in his hair and smeared across his thinner face, but those eyes bored holes into Sebastian’s head every mindless moment of his job for a month. Eventually he will say, “Franck, I think my name is Franck.”

When that day comes, Sebastian will pretend to be surprised. The guy doesn’t remember him, at least not anymore, so it’s just like with Kavinsky.

Except, of course, that it isn’t at all.

Because he’s always looking for something in Kavinsky that he already knows won’t be in the kid, in Franck. He already knows, from first blush, that Franck, the kid, well, he’s not all put together right. He looks okay, but he moves too smoothly from shivering wreck, to a pile of skin and bones and matted hair in Sebastian’s lap, to a sullen, furious thing with shadows under its skin. He’s mercurial by nature, and dark.

Before the accident, Kavinsky had taken him out and they both drank and smoked until even Pedro had given up on them.

Women were attracted to Kavinsky and he was absolutely charming to everyone, shifting easily from strong and handsome to warm and approachable. In comparison, Sebastian was a shadow. He always thought through what he was going to say before he said it, which meant that he held an arsenal of carefully crafted, obscene witticisms that Kavinsky said made him laugh so hard he might piss himself.

But these weren’t often things that attracted women. When they talked to him, they usually asked what he did, expecting him to be the dark, intellectual counterpart to Kavinsky rugged jock.

This night a woman had answered, “I’m a cop.” with “Does that mean you have a gun?”

Her dark hand crept up his thigh.

Then Kavinsky had intruded with an arm across his shoulders. He smelled like he’d been sweating vodka.

“Going home with her, Sebos?” he asked, smirking.

The girl laughed, shameless and happy.

“I can only hope.”

“I would,” Sebastian had said. “If I didn’t have to pour you into the passenger seat tonight.” He easily took the keys from Kavinsky’s pocket. As well as his lighter and his pack of smokes, as a tax paid.

“I’ll be lucky if I don’t need a mop and bucket,” he added, making Kavinsky laugh until he couldn’t stand. Not really a feat.

Kavinsky staggered away, leaning himself heavily on pretty blond things that giggled more than they spoke.

“It’s okay,” the girl said.

He thanked her.

“I mean, it’s fine if you’re interested in him, so long as you’d want to see me another night,” she’d said, with her canines showing when she smiled.

He saw her again, but the insinuation clung to him even as they shared a cigarette in bed. Her skin was dark, a lovely consistent shade that made his hands look pale instead of pink. Her black hair fell in thick, tight curls to her shoulders. She couldn’t be more different from a man whose hair was going grey at the temples, but when he plucked the cigarette from her lips he thought only of the hundreds of times he’d done the same to Kavinsky.

It worried him.

They had brought in two men, once, for disturbing the peace. They were booked for every charge from rioting to unlawful political action.

Passing through with a stack of drives and case files, the two were introduced as “The mustache and his Chinese cocksucker.”

“Your mother sucks cocks in Hell!” the Chinese cocksucker shouted.

“Oh, and they’re a pair of fucking Puritans, too,” the guard had added, laughing. “Ever heard of such a thing? Faggot holyrollers! How does that even work?”

He rushed the bars of the holding cell then, grabbing high and slamming his dirty boots against the bars. There was a lot of shouting after that. Sebastian could still hear it when he went to pull up their fresh booking file. The other one didn’t interest him, he checked the name and the blank look and moved onto the smaller, louder one.

Xavier was pretty in a way that being dirty and having awkward facial hair couldn’t disguise. From the posturing in his mugshot, he didn’t even bother trying to make something more masculine of his wide eyes and full lips. In the intake, he’d called himself Catholic, but Sebastian quietly filed him away as completely cracked.

The screaming about demons only calmed to a lot of dark muttering after that particular guard had left his shift.

He would rarely think of that moment again, dismissing it simply as a strange occurrence in a career that would be full of strangeness. He had thought of it that time, when a woman insinuated that he might like to suck Kavinsky’s cock. Or something.

And he would think of it again when he saw his first monster.

Dead-eyed, with blackness dripping from its slack lips, he wouldn’t hesitate in shooting it until it stopped twitching.

With Kavinsky, he would look for crimes before or as they were occurring — a career much more fruitful and satisfying than paper pushing case files could have ever been. When the demons of prisoner’s mad rantings showed up, it was like he’d found his calling.

Months in the future, he will meet the two again, having forgotten their names. He will call Xavier a Chinese cocksucker and the man wil smile politely and tell him that if he was a cocksucker, and he most certainly wasn’t, then at least he didn’t take it up the ass from a corpse and a fucking hell beast.

That would be an entirely inaccurate statement. Obviously the corpse and the hell beast were taking it up the ass from him.

“Gaspard, I think I’m going to vomit,” Xavier will say, curling his pouty lips in disgust. “Hold my flamethrower.”

There will come a day, somewhere between Xavier ranting about demons and their reunion when Sebastian will go to shave the black stubble off his face and have a visceral realization of his own position.

His lips will be bruised purple in the mirror, with pinpricks of red and a rash of broken blood vessels down his throat. Wounds on his shoulder and thigh will throb and itch with the sensations of healing. His hair will still be sticking up in three different directions and he will pause in that moment to look at, of all things, the red-handled toothbrush that he will share with Kavinsky.

“Who are you?” he will ask his reflection, as though he expects it to answer. Honestly, if it reached out, took his face in its hand and kissed him, he would not even be surprised.

That’s who he is going to be.

With fingers callused by the finicky grip on his pistol, he will have stroked Franck, the kid, the face on the Missing Person’s poster, until he came hot against his skin. He’ll have watched in fascination as features melted into darkness and tasted the smoky, cold texture of that darkness on his tongue. It will have grown fangs and tasted his blood. And he’ll have let it, even though he knew Danger would have just as happily eviscerated him.

Where was the shift? When had he become this other man?

Kavinsky had died. Franck had been kidnapped, tortured, then unleashed on the world broken and badly put back together. But in the flesh, Sebastian was the same man he’d ever been.

He will scroll back through his memories like a case file, looking for some vital shift. Had some part of him died with Kavinsky? With the first monster he’d killed? Was it holding his tongue as he held Franck’s skin and bones against him in the passenger seat?

His mind will snag on one moment though, in the middle of hundreds. It will bring him back into bed with a brown-skinned woman and to his knees before his mother; it will put him in the passenger seat of the Testarossa a hundred times waiting for the moment when they get wherever they’re going and he can light up again.

In the moment when he takes Kavinsky’s hand in his, perhaps he is already thinking of it. Maybe he thought of it when he first saw Xavier’s sultry mouth juxtaposed with the quiet shyness of Gaspard. Had he thought of it when Kavinsky peeled his sweat soaked shirt off stepping forward in just rugby shorts and cleats asking for a bottle of water and a drag from his cigarette?

These are questions he will ask himself then, as he had asked them before. Lighting cigarette after miserable cigarette until it feels like his throat is on fire, but he still can’t calm the shaking in his hands. He’s lost Kavinsky before, he will think, and he can’t do it again.

He will wake up in an empty room, beside an empty bed. Outside his window, there will be no sign of the Testarossa. There will be nothing to do, but sit and smoke and think. He’s good at these things, but it will feel like torture.

Walking used to be the way to work these things out in his head, but he won’t be able leave for fear that Kavinsky will come back. He will think about the flowers he leaves at a gravestone to no one — a name and a date. Sebastian will remember how he’d gone back for their brown corpses after he realizing how foolish he had been.

Thoughts of a mangled chassis and oil spilled like blood across asphalt will be pouring through his head just as Kavinsky steps through the door.

“Where have you been?” Sebastian will ask.

Kavinsky will say “Nowhere” and ask why he isn’t asleep, as though he would be able to when he’s alone again after so long.

“You look pathetic,” he will say, because Kavinsky will be soaked with rain and his shoulders will be slumped under the weight of his jacket.

“Thanks, buddy,” Kavinsky will say.

In that moment, Sebastian reaches out and when they touch he knows he will grab his friend and hold him until it hurts to hold any tighter.

There isn’t a breath between them then and there. The slow beat of Kavinsky’s heart brings Sebastian’s nervous, paranoid pulse back down to something like normal.

“You’re always leaving,” he admits.

And, of all things, Kavinsky apologizes. Sebastian shifts away to look at him. It’s a moment of weakness worn thin by exhaustion, worry, and nicotine. Kavinsky’s lips are cool and damp from rain. It’s so reassuring and pleasant that Sebastian keeps his lips there, his nose pressed against Kavinsky’s cheek and sunglasses pushing against his cheekbone, for too long.

He knows, then, that if this is something Kavinsky wants, it’s what he wants.

“I’m going to bed now,” Sebastian says.

Kavinsky follows him, lets him pull off his wet jacket and soaked jeans.

His tar-stained, gun-callused fingers pull off Kavinsky’s sunglasses and set them aside.

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

The insides of Kavinsky’s eyes shine red in a way that lights up his face and catches on his lashes.

“No,” he says.

He pauses and considers some realities he has learned about Kavinsky — the way he heals now and the coldness in his skin, the sluggish beat of his heart.

“It won’t fall off if we go too hard, will it?” Sebastian asks in the same soft, deadpan he uses for everything.

And Kavinsky laughs, really, truly laughs, and kisses him through reassurances that it won’t.

The laughter is so familiar and the chill in his flesh so expected, that nothing seems strange at all to Sebastian. Only in retrospect will he realize the way this will define the line between his past and his future.

Mostly because he’s thinking of how good it feels to kiss Kavinsky, even with the taste of old beer and cigarettes. In fact, that almost makes it pleasant. It’s something familiar in something very, very new.

He starts at Kavinsky’s chest, smoothing the hair back and forth under his palms. The slow thud of a heart speeds up. Cool hands trace contours of Sebastian’s arms and stomach that he’s never even thought about until Kavinsky touched them.

“Is this your first time since…” he wants to finish asking the question, but suddenly can’t.

“No,” he is told, but it feels that way.

Kavinsky is gentler than he expected and Sebastian isn’t as nervous as he thought he might be. It’s actually a thrill to finally wrap his hands around a half-hard erection when he reaches it.

“Wow,” Sebastian says, not thinking.

“Thanks,” Kavinsky answers.

They both laugh then, touching each other.

Kavinsky’s skin is so cool to the touch; he wants to touch all of it. He warms under Sebastian’s palms, under his open mouth. It is one of the most amazing things. He turns them over so he can sit astride Kavinsky’s legs and marvels in the sounds he can draw out of his friend. Yes, Kavinsky has always been expressive, but these things are new to him, and precious.

Harsh breaths drawn in and out, small gasps, and long moans make Sebastian feel something he’s never felt before this moment. He has no words for it, so he stays quiet. The silence is easily filled with kisses.

Eventually they both forget that they want to touch every inch of each other. Now they want to just touch. Hips grind against hips; one body above, one body below. Sebastian feels lost in it.

“You’re so quiet,” Kavinsky tells him.

He laughs and apologizes with a kiss. Kavinsky’s hands are warm from touching him. Sebastian curls one hand over Kavinsky’s hand and one over his dick. They show each other just the way they like it. Tight until the bones in Sebastian’s hand shift and he enjoys the slide of skin more than he thought.

A small moan bubbles up in his throat. Kavinsky smiles. Everything feels so deliberate. When Kavinsky tenses and comes, Sebastian thinks, “I did that.” He feels proud.

“I want to get you off,” Kavinsky says. “Come on, I want to hear that sound again.” His eyes are brighter than ever. Sebastian has never been able to say no to him, not ever, because everything Kavinsky wants is somehow exactly what he wants. That cool mouth against his belly and a tongue, two large hands that touch him with such curiosity.

Sebastian moans his name, makes him smirk.

Everything is so familiar, so right, but in the haze that lingers he doesn’t recognize himself in the taste on Kavinsky’s lips.


End file.
